All that may be called the patriarchal element in the state rested
in Greece and Italy on the same foundations. Under this head comes
especially the moral and decorous arrangement of social life, (9)
which enjoined monogamy on the husband and visited with heavy
penalties the infidelity of the wife, and which recognized the
equality of the sexes and the sanctity of marriage in the high
position which it assigned to the mother within the domestic circle.
On the other hand the rigorous development of the marital and still
more of the paternal authority, regardless of the natural rights of
persons as such, was a feature foreign to the Greeks and peculiarly
Italian; it was in Italy alone that moral subjection became
transformed into legal slavery. In the same way the principle of
the slave being completely destitute of legal rights--a principle
involved in the very nature of slavery--was maintained by the Romans
with merciless rigour and carried out to all its consequences;
whereas among the Greeks alleviations of its harshness were early
introduced both in practice and in legislation, the marriage of
slaves, for example, being recognized as a legal relation.

9. Even in details this agreement appears; e.g., in the designation of
lawful wedlock as "marriage concluded for the obtaining of lawful
children" (--gauos epi paidon gneision aroto--, -matrimonium
liberorum quaerendorum causa-).

On the household was based the clan, that is, the community of the
descendants of the same progenitor; and out of the clan among the
Greeks as well as the Italians arose the state. But while under
the weaker political development of Greece the clan-bond maintained
itself as a corporate power in contradistinction to that of
the state far even into historical times, the state in Italy made
its appearance at once complete, in so far as in presence of its
authority the clans were quite neutralized and it exhibited an
association not of clans, but of citizens. Conversely, again, the
individual attained, in presence of the clan, an inward independence
and freedom of personal development far earlier and more completely
in Greece than in Rome--a fact reflected with great clearness in
the Greek and Roman proper names, which, originally similar, came
to assume very different forms.